_THE GENIUS OF GREEK ART._
Separation between the Greeks and us.--Criticism.--Greek Sense
of Beauty.--Greek Morality.--Greece, Rome, Renaissance, the
Modern Spirit.
The Greeks had no past, "no hungry generations trod them down;" whereas
the multitudinous associations of immense antiquity envelop all our
thoughts and feelings.[274] "O Solon, Solon," said the priest of Egypt,
"you Greeks are always children!" The world has now grown old; we are
gray from the cradle onwards, swathed with the husks of outworn creeds,
and rocked upon the lap of immemorial mysteries. The travail of the
whole earth, the unsatisfied desires of many races, the anguish of
the death and birth of successive civilizations, have passed into our
souls. Life itself has become a thousandfold more complicated and more
difficult for us than it was in the spring-time of the world. With the
increase of the size of nations, poverty and disease and the struggle
for bare existence have been aggravated. How can we, then, bridge over
the gulf which separates us from the Greeks? How shall we, whose souls
are aged and wrinkled with the long years of humanity, shake hands
across the centuries with those young-eyed, young-limbed, immortal
children? Can we make criticism our Medea--bid the magnificent witch
pluck leaves and flowers of Greek poetry and art and life, distilling
them for us to bathe therein and regenerate our youth like Æson?
Like a young man newly come from the wrestling-ground, anointed,
chapleted, and very calm, the Genius of the Greeks appears before
us. Upon his soul there is as yet no burden of the world's pain; the
creation that groaneth and travaileth together has touched him with no
sense of anguish, nor has he yet felt sin. The pride and the strength
of adolescence are his--audacity and endurance, swift passions and
exquisite sensibilities, the alternations of sublime repose and boyish
noise, grace, pliancy, and stubbornness and power, love of all fair
things and radiant in the world, the frank enjoyment of the open air,
free merriment, and melancholy well beloved. Of these adolescent
qualities, of this clear and stainless personality, this conscience
whole and pure and reconciled to nature, what survives among us now?
The imagination must be strained to the uttermost before we can begin
to sympathize with such a being. The blear-eyed mechanic, stifled in
a hovel of our sombre Northern towns, canopied through all the year
with smoke, deafened with wheels that never cease to creak, stiffened
by toil in one cramped posture, oblivious of the sunlight and green
fields, could scarcely be taught even to envy the pure, clear life of
art made perfect in humanity, which was the pride of Hellas. His soul
is gladdened, if at all, by a glimpse of celestial happiness far off.
The hope that went abroad across the earth so many centuries ago has
raised his eyes to heaven. How can he comprehend a mode of existence in
which the world itself was adequate to all the wants of the soul, and
when to yearn for more than life affords was reckoned a disease?
We may tell of blue Ægean waves, islanded with cliffs that seem less
real than clouds, whereon the temples stand, burning like gold in
sunset or turning snowy fronts against the dawn. We may paint high
porches of the gods, resonant with music and gladdened with choric
dances; or describe perpetual sunshine and perpetual ease--no work from
year to year that might degrade the body or impair the mind, no dread
of hell, no yearning after heaven, but summer-time of youth and autumn
of old age and loveless death bewept and bravely borne.[275] The life
of the schools, the theatre, the wrestling-ground, the law-courts;
generous contests on the Pythian or Olympian plains; victorious
crowns of athletes or of patriots; Simonidean epitaphs and funeral
orations of Pericles for fallen heroes; the prize of martial prowess
or poetic skill; the honor paid to the pre-eminence of beauty--all
these things admit of scholar-like enumeration. Or we may recall by
fancy the olive-groves of the Academy; discern Hymettus pale against
the burnished sky, and Athens guarded by her glistening goddess of
the mighty brow--Pallas, who spreads her shield and shakes her spear
above the labyrinth of peristyles and pediments in which her children
dwell. Imagination can lead us to the plane-trees on Cephisus's shore,
the labors of the husbandmen who garner dues of corn and oil, the
galleys in Peiræan harborage. Or, with the Lysis and the Charmides
beneath our eyes, we may revisit the haunts of the wrestlers and the
runners, true-born Athenians, fresh from the bath and crowned with
violets--chaste, vigorous, inured to rhythmic movements of the passions
and the soul.
Yet, after all, when the process of an elaborate culture has thus been
toilsomely accomplished, when we have trained our soul to sympathize
with that which is so novel and so strange and yet so natural, few of
us can fairly say that we have touched the Greeks at more than one or
two points. _Novies Styx interfusa coercet_: between us and them crawls
the nine times twisted stream of death. The history of the human race
is one; and without the Greeks we should be nothing. But just as an old
man of ninety is not the same being as the boy of nineteen--nay, cannot
even recall to memory how and what he felt when the pulse of manhood
was yet gathering strength within his veins--even so now civilized
humanity looks back upon the youth of Hellas and wonders what she was
in that blest time.
A few fragments yet remain from which we strive to reconstruct the
past. Criticism is the product of the weakness as well as of the
strength of our age. In the midst of our activity we have so little
that is artistically salient or characteristic in our life that we are
not led astray by our own individuality or tempted to interpret the
past wrongly by making it square with the present. Impartial clearness
of judgment in scientific research, laborious antiquarian zeal,
methodic scrupulousness in preserving the minutest details of local
coloring, and an earnest craving to escape from the dreary present of
commonplace routine and drudgery into the spirit-stirring freedom of
the past--these are qualities of the highest value which our century
has brought to bear upon history. They make up in some measure for
our want of the creative faculties which more productive but less
scientific ages have possessed, and enable those who have but little
original imagination to enjoy imaginative pleasures at second hand by
living as far as may be in the clear light of antique beauty.
The sea, the hills, the plains, the sunlight of the South, together
with some ruins which have peopled Europe with phantoms of dead art,
and the relics of Greek literature, are our guides in the endeavor to
restore the past of Hellas. Among rocks golden with broom-flowers,
murmurous with bees, burning with anemones in spring and oleanders
in summer, and odorous through all the year with thyme, we first
assimilate the spirit of the Greeks. It is here that we divine the
meaning of the myths, and feel those poems that expressed themselves
in marble mid the temples of the gods to have been the one right
outgrowth from the sympathy of man, as he was then, with nature. In
the silence of mountain valleys thinly grown with arbutus and pine and
oak, open at all seasons to pure air, and breaking downwards to the
sea, we understand the apparition of Pan to Pheidippides, we read the
secret of a nation's art that aimed at definition before all things.
The bay of Naples, the coast of Sicily, are instinct with the sense
of those first settlers, who, coasting round the silent promontories,
ran their keels upon the shelving shore, and drew them up along the
strand, and named the spot Neapolis or Gela. The boys of Rome were yet
in the wolf's cavern. Vesuvius was a peaceful hill on which the olive
and the vine might slumber. The slopes of Pozzuoli were green with
herbs, over which no lava had been poured. Wandering about Sorrento,
the spirit of the _Odyssey_ is ours. Those fishing-boats with lateen
sail are such as bore the heroes from their ten years' toil at Troy.
Those shadowy islands caught the gaze of Æneas straining for the
promised land. Into such clefts and rents of rock strode Herakles and
Jason when they sought the golden apples and the golden fleece. Look
down. There gleam the green and yellow dragon-scales, coiled on the
basement of the hills, and writhing to each curve and cleavage of the
chasm. Is it a dream? Do we in fact behold the mystic snake, or in the
twilight do those lustrous orange-trees deceive our eyes? Nay, there
are no dragons in the ravine--only thick boughs and burnished leaves
and snowy bloom and globes of glittering gold. Above them on the cliff
sprout myrtle-rods, sacred to Love, myrtle-branches, with which the
Athenians wreathed their swords in honor of Harmodius. Lilies and
jonquils and hyacinths stand, each straight upon his stem--a youth, as
Greeks imagined, slain by his lover's hand, or dead for love of his
own loveliness, or cropped in love's despite by death that is the foe
of love. Scarlet and white anemones are there, some born of Adonis's
blood, and some of Aphrodite's tears. All beauty fades; the flowers
of earth, the bloom of youth, man's strength, and woman's grace, all
wither and relapse into the loveless and inexorable grave. This the
Greeks knew, mingling mirth with melancholy, and love with sadness,
their sweetest songs with elegiac melodies.
Beneath the olive-trees, among the flowers and ferns, move stately
maidens and bare-chested youths. Their eyes are starry-softened or
flash fire, and their lips are parted to drink in the breath of life.
Some are singing in the fields an antique, world-old monotone of song.
Was not the lay of Linus, the burden of #makrai tai dryes ô Menalka#
(High are the oak-trees, O Menalcas), some such canzonet as this? These
late descendants of Greek colonists are still beautiful--like moving
statues in the sunlight and the shadow of the boughs. Yonder tall,
straight girl, whose pitcher, poised upon her head, might have been
filled by Electra or Chrysothemis with lustral waters for a father's
tomb, carries her neck as nobly as a Fate of Pheidias. Her body sways
upon the hips, where rests her modelled arm; the ankle and the foot
are sights to sit and gaze at through a summer's day. And where, if
not here, shall we meet with Hylas and Hyacinth, with Ganymede and
Hymenæus, in the flesh? As we pass the laughter and the singing die
away. Bright dresses and pliant forms are lost. We stray onward through
the sheen and shade of olive-branches.
The olive was Athene's gift to Hellas, and Athens carved its leaves
and berries on her drachma with the head of Pallas and her owl. The
light which never leaves its foliage, silvery beneath and sparkling
from the upper surface of burnished green, the delicacy of its stem,
which in youth and middle and old age retains the distinction of finely
accentuated form, the absence of sombre shadow on the ground beneath
its branches, might well fit the olive to be the symbol of the purity
of classic art. Each leaf is cut into a lance-head of brilliancy, not
jagged or fanciful or woolly like the foliage of Northern trees. There
is here no mystery of darkness, no labyrinth of tortuous shade, no
conflict of contrasted forms. Excess of light sometimes fatigues the
eye amid those airy branches, and we long for the repose of gloom to
which we are accustomed in our climate. But gracefulness, fertility,
power, radiance, pliability, are seen in every line. The spirit of
the Greeks itself is not more luminous and strong and subtle. The
color of the olive-tree, again, is delicate. Its pearly grays and
softened greens in nowise interfere with the lustre which is the true
distinction of the tree. Clear and faint like Guido's colors in the
Ariadne of St. Luke's at Rome, distinct as the thought in a Greek
epigram, the olive-branches are relieved against the bright blue of the
sea. The mountain slopes above are clothed by them with light as with
a raiment; clinging to knoll and vale and winding creek, rippling in
hoary undulations to the wind, they wrap the hills from feet to flank
in lucid haze. Above the olives shine bare rocks in steady noon or
blush with dawn and evening.[276] Nature is naked and beautiful beneath
the sun--like Aphrodite, whose raiment falls waist-downward to her
sandals on the sea, but whose pure breasts and forehead are unveiled.
Nature is thus the first, chief element by which we are enabled to
conceive the spirit of the Greeks. The key to their mythology is here.
Here is the secret of their sympathies, the well-spring of their
deepest thoughts, the primitive potentiality of all they have achieved
in art. What is Apollo but the magic of the sun whose soul is light?
What is Aphrodite but the love-charm of the sea? What is Pan but the
mystery of nature, the felt and hidden want pervading all? What, again,
are those elder, dimly discovered deities, the Titans and the brood of
Time, but forces of the world as yet beyond the touch and ken of human
sensibilities? But nature alone cannot inform us what that spirit was.
For though the Greeks grew up in scenes which we may visit, they gazed
on them with Greek eyes, eyes different from ours, and dwelt upon them
with Greek minds, minds how unlike our own! Unconsciously, in their
long and unsophisticated infancy, the Greeks absorbed and assimilated
to their own substance that loveliness which it is left for us only to
admire. Between them and ourselves--even face to face with mountain,
sky, and sea, unaltered by the lapse of years--flow the rivers of Death
and Lethe and New Birth, and the mists of thirty centuries of human
life are woven like a veil. To pierce that veil, to learn even after
the most partial fashion how they transmuted the splendors of the world
into æsthetic forms, is a work which involves the further interrogation
of their sculpture and their literature.
The motives of that portion of Greek sculpture which bring us close
to the incidents of Greek life are very simple. A young man binding
a fillet round his head; a boy drawing a thorn from his foot; a girl
who has been wounded in the breast raising her arm to show where
the sword smote her; an athlete bending every sinew to discharge
the quoit; a line of level-gazing youths on prancing horses, some
faring forward with straight eyes, one turning, with bridle-hand held
tightly, to encourage his companion, another with loose mantle in the
act to mount, others thrown back to rein upon their haunches chafing
steeds; a procession of draped maidens bearing urns; a maiden, draped
from neck to ankle, holding in both hands a lustral vase--such are
the sculptured signs by which we read the placid physical fulfilment
of Greek life. That the serenity of satisfied existence is an end
in itself, and that death in the plenitude of vigor is desirable,
the reliefs of Pheidias and the Æginetan marbles teach us. In these
simple but consummate works of art the beauty of pure health, physical
enjoyment, temperance, mental vigor, and heroic daring mingle and
create one splendor of a human being sensitive to all influences and
vital in every faculty. Excess can nowhere be discovered. Compare with
these forms for a moment the Genii painted by Michael Angelo upon the
roof of the Sistine Chapel. Over them has passed the spirit with its
throes: _la maladie de la pensée_ is there. Of no Phoebus and no Pallas
are they the servants; but ministers of prophets and sibyls, angels
of God fulfilling his word, they incarnate the wrestlings and the
judgments and the resurrections of the soul. Now take a banquet-scene
from some Greek vase. Along the cushioned couch lie young men, naked,
crowned with myrtles; in their laps are women, and at their sides broad
jars of honeyed wine. A winged Eros hovers over them, and their lips
are opened to sing a song of ancient love. Yet this is no forecast of
Borgia revels in Rome, or of the French Regent's Parc aux Cerfs. When
Autolycus entered the symposium of Xenophon, all tongues were stricken
dumb; man gazed at man in wonder at his goodliness. When Charmides,
heading the troop of wrestlers, joined Socrates in the palæstra, the
soul of the philosopher was troubled; such beauty was for him a sacred,
spirit-shaking thing. Simætha, in the _Pharmaceutria_ of Theocritus,
beheld the curls of youths on horseback like laburnum-flowers, and
their bosoms whiter than the moon.
We need not embark on antiquarian or metaphysical or historical
discussions in order to understand the sense of beauty which was
inherent in the Greeks. Little hints scattered by the wayside are
far more helpful. Take, for example, the _Clouds_ of Aristophanes;
and after reading the speech of the Dikaios Logos, stand beneath
the Athlete of Lysippus,[277] in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican.
"Fresh and fair in beauty-bloom you shall pass your days in the
wrestling-ground, or run races beneath the sacred olive-trees, crowned
with white reed, in company with a pure-hearted friend, smelling of
bindweed and leisure hours and the white poplar that sheds her leaves,
rejoicing in the prime of spring, when the plane-tree whispers to
the lime." This life the Dikaios Logos offers to the young Athenian
if he will forego the law-courts and the lectures of the sophists
and the house of the hetaira. This life rises above us imaged in the
sculptor's marble. The athlete, tall and stately, tired with healthy
exercise, lifts one arm, and with his strigil scrapes away the oil
with which he has anointed it. His fingers hold the die that tells his
number in the contest. Upon his features there rests no shade of care
or thought, but the delicious languor of momentary fatigue, and the
serenity of a nature in harmony with itself. A younger brother of the
same lineage is the Adorante of the Berlin Museum. His eyes and arms
are raised to heaven. Perfect in humanity, beneath the lightsome vault
of heaven he stands and prays--a prayer of joy and calm thanksgiving, a
Greek prayer--no Roman adoration with veiled eyes and muttering lips,
no Jewish prostration with the putting-off of sandals on the holy
ground, no Christian genuflection like the bending of wind-smitten
reeds beneath the spirit-breath of sacraments. The whirlwind of the
mightiest religions, born in the mystic East, has not passed over him;
he has not searched their depths of awe, their heights of ecstasy,
nor felt their purifying fires. Iamos in the mid-waves of Alpheus
might have prayed thus when he heard the voice of Phoebus calling to
him and promising the twofold gift of prophecy. All the statues of
the athletes bear the seal and blossom of #sôphrosynê#--that truly
Greek virtue, the correlative in morals to the passion for beauty.
"When I with justice on my lips flourished," says the Dikaios Logos,
"and modesty was held in honor, then a boy's voice was not heard; but
they went orderly through the streets in bands together from their
quarters to the harp-player's school, uncloaked and barefoot, even
though it snowed like meal." Of this sort are the two wrestling boys
at Florence, whose strained muscles exhibit the chord of masculine
vigor vibrating with tense vitality. If we in England seek some living
echo of this melody of curving lines we must visit the water meadows
where boys bathe in early morning, or the playgrounds of our public
schools in summer, or the banks of the Isis when the eights are on
the water, or the riding-schools of soldiers. We cannot reconstitute
the elements of Greek life; but here and there we may gain hints for
adding breath and pulse and movement to Greek sculpture. What for the
Greeks was a permanent and normal condition is for us an accident.
Therefore our conception of existence--more intense in emotion, more
profound, perhaps, in thought--contains an element of strife and pain,
an interruption of the purely physical harmony, which the Greek ideal
lacked.
The charm which the simplest things acquired under the hand of a Greek
artificer may be seen in the adornment of a circular hand-mirror.[278]
Ivy-branches, dividing both ways from the handle, surround its rim with
a delicate tracery of sharp-cut leaf and corymb. The central space is
occupied by four figures--on the right, the boy Dionysus, who welcomes
his mother in heaven; on the left, Phoebus and a young Paniscus playing
on the double pipes. Grace can go no further than in the attitude and
the expression of this group. Dionysus is thrown backward; both his
arms are raised to encircle the neck of Semele, who bends to kiss his
upturned lips. A necklace with pendent balls defines the throat of the
stripling where it meets his breast, suggesting by some touch beyond
analysis the life that pulses in his veins. He has armlets too below
the elbow, and his hair ripples in ringlets between cheek and shoulder.
The little Paniscus is seated, attending only to his music, with such
childish earnestness as shows that his whole soul goes forth in piping.
Phoebus, half-draped and lustrous, stands erect beside a slender shaft
of laurel planted on the ground. Such are the delights of Paradise to
which, as Greeks imagined, a deity might welcome his earthly mother,
leading her by the hand from Hades. It would be easy enough to fill
a volume with such descriptions--to unlock the cabinets of gems and
coins, or to linger over vases painted with the single figure of a
winged boy in tender red upon their blackness, and showing the word
#KALOS# negligently written at the side.
But it is more to the purpose to note in passing that delicate
perception of associated qualities which led the Greeks to maintain
a sympathy between cognate deities, while distinguishing to the
utmost their specific attributes. Aphrodite, Eros, Dionysus, Hermes,
Hermaphrodite, the Graces, the Nymphs, the Genius of Death--these, for
example, though carefully individualized, are still of one kindred.
They blend and mingle in a concord of separate yet interpenetrating
beauties. Between the radiant Aphrodite of Melos, who in her triumphant
attitude seems to be an elder sister of the brazen-winged Victory
of Brescia, and the voluptuous Aphrodite Callipygos,[279] a whole
rhythm of finely modulated forms may be drawn out, each one of which
corresponds to some mood or moment of the enamoured soul. Her immortal
son in the Eros of Pheidias[280] is imagined as the "first of gods,"
#theôn prôtistos#, upstarting in his slenderness of youth from
Chaos--the keen, fine light of dawn dividing night from day. In the
Praxitelean Cupid--
That most perfect of antiques,
They call the Genius of the Vatican,
Which seems too beauteous to endure itself
In this rough world--
he becomes the deity described by Plato in the _Phædrus_, an
incarnation of passion, tinged, in spite of his own radiance, with
sadness. What thought has made him sorrowful and bowed his head?
Perhaps Theognis can tell us:
#aphrones anthrôpoi kai nêpioi, hoite thanontas
klaious' oud' hêbês anthos apollymenon.#[281]
The winged boy, again, bending his bow against the hearts of lovers,
with his lion's skin beside him,[282] is the Eros of Agathon--he who
delights to walk delicately upon the tender places of the soul. Next
we find him asleep upon his folded pinions, the mischievous child who
rewarded Anacreon's hospitality by wounding him, and who gave to the
thirsty heart of Meleager scalding tears to drink. How, in the last
place, are we to distinguish Love from Harpocrates, the silent, with
one finger on his lip?
Turn next to Hermes. When the herald of Olympus met Priam midway
between Troy-town and Achilles' tent, he was, says Homer,
#neêniêi andri eoikôs,
prôton hypênêtêi, touper chariestatê hêbê#,
"like a young man, with budding beard, whose bloom is in the prime of
grace." This adolescent loveliness belongs throughout to Hermes. As
the genius of the gymnasium,[283] he is a deified athlete, scarcely to
be distinguished from the quoit-throwers and the runners he protects.
The Hermes, who woos a nymph with his arm around her waist,[284] has
Persuasion for his parent. Again, the seated Hermes, with wings upon
his ankles, is the swiftness of auroral light incarnate.[285] Nor
lastly, when, with chlamys thrown upon his shoulder and petasos slung
from his neck, he leads souls to Hades, caduceus in hand, has he
lost this quality of youth and lustre.[286] He upon Aphrodite begat
Hermaphrodite. Their union--the union of athletic goodliness and
consummate womanhood--produced a blending of two beauties forgotten by
an oversight of nature.
How various again is Bacchus, passing from the stately mildness of the
bearded Indian god to the wantonness of Phales, the "night-wandering
reveller!" At one time you can scarcely distinguish him from young
Apollo or young Herakles; at another his brows and tresses have the
chastity of Love; again he assumes the voluptuous form which befits
the sire by Aphrodite of Priapus. The fascination of the grape-juice
lends itself to all qualities that charm the soul of man. Yet another
of these cognate deities may be mentioned. That is the Genius of
Eternal Slumber,[287] reclining with arms folded above his head,
upright against a tree. To judge by his attitude, he might be Bacchus,
wine-drowsy, as in a statue of the gallery at Florence. Looking at his
long tresses, we call him Love: and what deities are of closer kin
than Love and Death? His stately form, not unlike that of Phoebus,
makes us exclaim in Æschylean language, #ô thanate paian# (O Death, the
healer!). But he is stronger and more enduring, less swift to move,
less light of limb, than any of these. It was a deep and touching
intuition of the Greeks which prompted them to ascribe these kinships
to Death. Who knows even now whether the winged and sworded genius of
the Ephesus column be Love or Death? To trace such analogies further
would be fanciful: it is enough to pluck at random a few blossoms, and
to scatter them for lovers. To Winckelmann and the antiquaries may be
left the accurate distinctions of the Greek deities. Without seeking
to confound these, but rather studying them most carefully, we may yet
discern by passing hints that purity of tact which enabled the Greeks
to interpret in their statuary every _nuance_ of feeling and of fancy,
and to mark by subtlest suggestions their points of agreement as well
as of divergence.
When Hippolytus in Euripides first appears upon the scene, he greets
Artemis with these words:
Lady, for thee this garland have I woven
Of wilding flowers, plucked from an unshorn meadow,
Where neither shepherd dares to feed his flock,
Nor ever scythe hath swept, but through the grasses
Unshorn in spring the bee pursues her labors,
And maiden modesty with running rills
Waters the garden.
Before the Meleager of the Vatican, so calm and strong and redolent of
forest odors, this orison rings in our memory, and the Diana of the
Louvre seems ready to spring forth and loose her hind and call on the
hero to hunt with her. The life of woods and mountains was divined and
interpreted with fine sensibility by the Attic sculptors. Children
of the earth, and conscious of their own recent birth from the bosom
of the divine in nature, they loved all fair and fresh things of the
open world fraternally. Therefore they could carve the mystery of the
Praxitelean Faun,[288] whose subtle smile is a lure for souls, and the
profound sleep of the Barberini Faun,[289] who seems to have but half
escaped from elemental existence, and still to own some kindred with
unconscious things. The joy of the shepherd who carries on his back a
laughing child at Naples; the linked arms of Bacchus and Ampelus; the
young Triton[290] who blows his horn over the crests of the waves, and
calls upon his brethren the billows to rejoice with him, as he bears
his nymph away; the subtle charm of double life in Hermaphrodite,
in whom two sexes are hidden, like a bitter and a sweet almond in
one beautiful but barren husk; the frank sensuality of Silenus and
Priapus; the dishevelled hair and quivering flanks of Mænads; the
laughter of Eros wreathed around with coils of the enamoured dolphin's
tail;[291] the pride of the eagle soaring heavenward with Ganymede
among his plumes: from tokens like these, together with the scenes of
the Bacchæ and the Cyclops of Euripides, the idyls of Theocritus, and
the dedicatory epigrams of the Anthology, we learn of what sort was
the sympathy of the Greeks for nature. Their beautiful humanity is so
close to the mother ever youthful of all life, to the full-breasted
earth, that they seem calling through their art to the woods and
waves and rivers, crying to their brethren that still tarry: "Come
forth, and be like us; begin to feel and know your happiness; put on
the form of flesh in which the world's soul reaches consciousness!"
Humanity defined upon the borderland of nature is the life of all Greek
sculpture. Even the gods are films of fleshly form emergent on the
surface of the elements. The circle of the sun dilates, and Phoebus
grows into distinctness with the glory round him; out of the liquid
ether gaze the divine eyes of Zeus; Poseidon rises breast-high from the
mirrors of the sea. Man, for the first time conscious of his freedom,
yet clinging still to the breasts that gave him suck, like a flower
rooted to the kindly earth, expresses all his thought and feeling in
the language of his own shape. "The Greek spirit," says Hegel, "is the
plastic artist forming the stone into a work of art." And this work
of art is invariably the image of a man or woman. The most sublime
aspirations, the subtlest intuitions, the darkest forebodings, the
audacities of passion, the freedom of the senses, put on personality
in Hellas and assume a robe of carnal beauty. In Egypt and the Orient
humanity lay still upon "the knees of a mild mystery." The Egyptians
had not discovered the magic word by means of which the world might
be translated into the language of mankind: their art still remained
within the sphere of symbolism which excludes true sympathy. The Jews
had concentrated their thought upon moral phenomena: in their jealousy
of the abstract purity of the soul they banned the arts as impious.
Theognis tells us that when the Muses and the Graces came down from
Olympus to the marriage-feast of Cadmus and Harmonia, they sang a song
with this immortal burden:
#hotti kalon, philon esti; to d' ou kalon ou philon estin.#[292]
This strikes the key-note to the music of the Greek genius. Beauty is
the true province of the Greeks, their indefeasible domain. But their
conception of beauty was both more comprehensive and more concrete than
any which a modern race, perturbed by the division of the flesh and
spirit, conscious of Jewish no less than Greek tradition, can attain
to. When Goethe expressed his theory of life in the following couplet,
Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben,[293]
he supplied us with a correct definition of the spirit which governed
Hellas. Beauty to the Greeks was one aspect of the universal synthesis,
commensurate with all that is fair in manners and comely in morals.
It was the harmony of man with nature in a well-balanced and complete
humanity, the bloom of health upon a conscious being, satisfied, as
flowers and stars are satisfied, with the conditions of temporal
existence. It was the joy-note of the whole world, heard and echoed by
the sole being who could comprehend it--man. That alone was beautiful
which uttered a sound in unison with the whole, and all was good which
had this quality of concord. To be really beautiful was to be an
integral part of the world's symphony, to be developed fully in all
parts, without an undue preference for the soul before the body or for
the passions before the reason--to maintain the rhythm and the measure
and the balance of those faculties which characterize man, nature's
masterpiece. The profounder reaches of this thought were explored by
philosophers, who figured the soul as a harmony, who conceived of God
as the Idea of Beauty, or who, like Marcus Aurelius, defined virtue
to be a living and enthusiastic sympathy with nature. In the region
of social life it led the Greeks to treat the State as an organic
whole, which might be kept in preservation by the balance of its
several forces. In the sphere of religion it produced a race of gods,
each perfect in his individuality, distinct and self-contained, but
blending, like the colors of the prism, in the white light of Zeus,
who was the whole.[294] In actual life it facilitated the development
of characters which, by the free expansion of personality and by a
conscious culture, were themselves consummate works of art. Just as the
unity of the Greek religion was not the unity of the one, but of the
many, blent and harmonized in the variety that we observe in nature,
so the ideal of Greek life imposed no commonplace conformity to one
fixed standard on individuals, but each man was encouraged to complete
and realize the type of himself to the utmost. Pericles devoted his
energy to the perfecting of statesmanship, and became the incarnation
of the Athenian spirit; Pindar was a poet through and through; for
the Olympian victor it was enough to be physically complete; Pheidias
lived in concord with the universe by his exclusive devotion to his
art. Thus formed and modelled to the utmost perfection each of his own
kind, these characters, when contemplated together from a distance,
like the deities of Olympus, present, in the harmony that springs from
difference, an ideal of humanity. The Greek no less than the Christian
might need to cut off his right hand--to debar himself like Pericles
from the pleasures of society, or to cast aside the sin that doth so
easily beset us, like Socrates, who trampled under foot his sensual
instincts--for the attainment of that self-evolution which gave him
the right to be one note in the concord of the whole, one color in the
prism of humanity. The one thing needful to him was, not belief in the
unseen, nor of necessity holiness, but a firm resolve to comprehend and
cultivate his own capacity, and thus to add his quota to the sum of
beauty in the world.
The Greeks were essentially a nation of artists. Of the infinite
attributes of God, of the infinite qualities of the whole, they clearly
apprehended beauty. _That_ they conceived largely and liberally, not
narrowly and partially, as we are wont to do. And, like consummate
craftsmen, they did thoroughly whatsoever in the region of things
plastic their hands found to do--so thoroughly that men have only done
the work again in so far as they have followed the Greek rule. When
we speak of the Greeks as an æsthetic nation, this is what we mean.
Guided by no supernatural revelation, with no Mosaic law for conduct,
they trusted their #aisthêsis#, delicately trained and preserved in a
condition of the utmost purity. This tact is the ultimate criterion in
all matters of art--a truth which we recognize in our use of the word
æsthetic, though we too often attempt to import the alien elements of
metaphysical dogmatism and moral prejudice into the sphere of beauty.
This tact was also for the Greeks the ultimate criterion of ethics.
#Hygiainein men ariston andri thnatôi#, says Simonides.[295] A man in
perfect health of mind and body, enjoying the balance of mental, moral,
and physical qualities which health implies, carried within himself the
norm and measure of propriety. Those were the days when "love was an
unerring light, and joy its own security." What we call the conscience,
our continual reference to the standard of the divine will, scarcely
existed for the Greek. To that further stage in the education of the
world, where moral instincts are deepened and enforced by spiritual
religion, he had not advanced. But instead of it he had for a guide
this true artistic sensibility, developed by centuries of training,
fortified by traditional canons of good taste and prudence, and subject
to continual correction by reciprocal comparison and dialectical
debate. The lawgiver, the sculptor, the athlete, the statesman, the
philosopher, the poet, the warrior, the musician, each added something
of his own to the formation of a #koinê aisthêsis#, or common taste, by
which the individual might regulate his instincts.
To suppose that the Greeks were not a highly moralized race is perhaps
the strangest misconception to which religious prejudice has ever
given rise. If their morality was æsthetic and not theocratic, it was
none the less on that account humane and real. The difficulty for the
critic is to seize exactly that which is Hellenic--enduring and common
to the race, not transient and due to individuals--in their religion
and their ethics. In order to appreciate the first fine flavor of the
Greek intellect, it is necessary to go back to Homer, who represents a
period when the instincts of the Hellenes had not been sophisticated by
philosophical reflection or vitiated by contact with Asiatic luxury.
Homer joins hands with Pheidias and Aristophanes and Sophocles in a
chain of truly Greek tradition. But side by side with them there runs
a deeper and more mystic strain. The blood-justice of the Eumenides,
the asceticism of Pythagoras, the purificatory rites of Empedocles and
Epimenides, the dreadful belief in a jealous God, and the doctrine
of hereditary guilt in Theognis, Herodotus, and Solon, are fragments
of primitive or Asiatic superstition unharmonized with the serene
element of the Hellenic spirit. At the same time the orgiastic cult
of Dionysus and the voluptuous worship of the Corinthian Aphrodite
are intrusions from without. To eliminate such cruder moral and
religious notions was the impulse of the vigorous Greek mind. Yet at
one critical moment of history mysticism attained undue development
and bid fair to force the Hellenic genius into uncongenial regions.
The Persian war, by its lesson of a mortal peril escaped miraculously,
quickened the spiritual convictions of the race.[296] It was then
that Æschylus conceived his tragic doctrine of Retribution, whereof
the motto is #tôi drasanti pathein#, and Pindar sounded with an awful
sense of mystery the possible abysses of a future life. Greece,
after the struggle with Xerxes, passed through a period of feverish
exaltation, in which her placid contemplation of the beauty of the
world was interrupted. She, whose vocation it was to see only by the
light of the serene and radiant sun, seemed on the verge of becoming a
clairvoyant. But the balance was soon righted. Even in Pindar, moral
mysticism is, as it were, encysted, like an alien deposit, in the
more vital substance of æsthetic conceptions. Sophocles corrects the
gloomy extravagance of Æschylus. The law of tragedy in Sophocles is no
longer that the doer of a deed must suffer, but that he who offends
unwittingly will be accounted innocent. Euripides shifts the ground
of moral interest from religious beliefs to sophistical analysis.
Meanwhile Aristophanes, the true Athenian conservative, is equally
opposed to metaphysical subtleties and to superstitious fancies;
while Socrates directs his polemic against sciolism in philosophy and
childishness in mythology, without thinking it worth while to attack
the superstition of the mystics. In Plato's ethics the highest altitude
of sane Greek speculation is attained; and here we see how much akin,
in all essential matters of morality, the intuition of the Greeks was
to the revealed doctrine of the Christians. Aristophanes reflects the
clearest image of Greek versatility and cheerfulness. Pericles, freed
by Anaxagoras from foolish fears, realizes the genuine Greek life of
steadfast, self-reliant activity. The drama of Sophocles sets forth
a complete view of human destiny as conceived by the most perfect
of Greek intellects. Antigone dares to trust her own #aisthêsis#,
her moral tact, in opposition to unnatural law. Oedipus suffers no
further than his own quality of rashness justifies. When we arrive
at Aristotle, who yields the abstract of all that previously existed
in the Greek mind, we see that the scientific spirit has achieved a
perfect triumph. His science is the correlative in the region of pure
thought to the art which in sculpture had pursued an uninterrupted
course of natural evolution.
In the adolescent age of the Greek genius, mankind, not having yet
fully arrived at spiritual self-consciousness, was still as sinless and
simple as any other race that lives and dies upon the globe, forming a
part of the natural order of the world. The sensual impulses, within
reasonable limits, like the intellectual and the moral, were then
held void of crime and harmless. Health and good taste controlled
the physical appetites of man, just as the appetites of animals
are regulated by unerring instinct. In the same way a standard of
moderation determined moral virtue and intellectual excellence. But
in addition to this protective check upon the passions, a noble sense
of the beautiful, as that which is balanced and restrained within
limits, prevented the Greeks of the best period from diverging into
Asiatic extravagance of pleasure. License was reckoned barbarous,
and the barbarians were slaves by nature, #physei douloi#: Hellenes,
born to be free men, took pride in temperance. Their #sôphrosynê#, or
self-restraint, coextensive as a protective virtue with the whole of
their #to kalon#, or ideal of form, was essentially Greek--the quality
beloved by Phoebus, in whom was no dark place nor any flaw. With the
Romans, humanity, not having yet transcended the merely natural order,
remaining unconscious of a higher religious ideal, and at the same
time uncontrolled by exquisite Greek sense of fitness, began to wax
wanton. To the state of paradisal innocence succeeded the fall. The
bestial side of our mixed nature encroached upon the spiritual, and
the sense of beauty was perturbed by lust. That true health, without
which the unassisted tact is a false guide, failed; no fine law of
taste corrected appetite. It was at this moment that Christianity
convicted mankind of sin. The voice of God was heard crying in the
garden. The unity of man with nature was abruptly broken. Flesh and
spirit were defined and counterpoised. Man, abiding far from God in his
flesh, sought after God in his spirit. His union with God was no longer
an actual state of mundane innocence, but a distant, future, dim,
celestial possibility, to be achieved by the sacrifice of this fair
life of earth. "Your lives are hid with Christ in God." Together with
this separation of the flesh and spirit wrought by Christianity, came
the abhorrence of beauty as a snare, the sense that carnal affections
were tainted with sin, the unwilling toleration of sexual love as a
necessity, the idealization of celibacy and solitude. At the same time
humanity acquired new faculties and wider sensibilities, those varied
powers which make the modern man more complex and more mighty both for
good and evil than the ancient. A profounder and more vital feeling of
the mysteries of the universe arose. Our life on earth was seen to be
a thing by no means rounded in itself and perfect, but only one term
of an infinite and unknown series. It was henceforward impossible to
translate the world into the language of purely æsthetic form. This
stirring of the spirit marks the transition of the ancient to the
modern world.
At the time of the Renaissance the travail was well-nigh over; the
lesson had been learned and exaggerated; mankind began to resent the
one-sidedness of monastic Christianity, and to yearn once more for the
fruit and flowers of the garden which was Greece. Yet the spirit and
the flesh still remained in unreconciled antagonism. Over the gate
of Eden the arm of the seraph waved his terrible sword. But humanity
in rebellion, while outcast from God and convicted of sin, would not
refrain from plucking the pleasure of the sense. This was the time of
the insolence of the flesh, when antichrist sat in St. Peter's chair,
and when man, knowing his nakedness, submitted to the fascinations
of the siren, Shame. The old health of the Greeks, their simple and
unerring tact, was gone: to recover that was impossible. Christ crowned
with thorns, the Sabbaths and ablutions of the Jews, the "thunderous
vision" of St. Paul, had intervened and fixed a gulf between Hellas and
modern Europe. In that age the love of beauty became a tragic disease
like the plague which Aphrodite sent in wrath on Phædra. Even Michael
Angelo, at the end of a long life spent in the service of the noblest
art, felt constrained to write:
Now hath my life across a stormy sea,
Like a frail bark, reached that wide port where all
Are bidden ere the final judgment fall,
Of good and evil deeds to pay the fee.
Now know I well how that fond fantasy,
Which made my soul the worshipper and thrall
Of earthly art, is vain; how criminal
Is that which all men seek unwillingly.
Those amorous thoughts which were so lightly dressed,
What are they when the double death is nigh?
The one I know for sure, the other dread.
Painting nor sculpture now can lull to rest
My soul, that turns to his great love on high,
Whose arms to clasp us on the cross were spread.
In his work sculpture is forced to express what lies beyond its
province--the throes and labor of the spirit. Michael Angelo was not
a plastic character in the sense in which Hegel used this phrase.
His art reflects the combat of his nature and his age; whence comes
what people call its extravagance and emphasis. Raphael from the
opposite side introduced pagan form and feeling into his purely
religious work of art; whence came what people call his decadence.
Puritan England, inquisition-ridden Spain, and critical Germany offer
still more permanent signs of this deep-seated division in the modern
world between the natural instincts and the spiritual aspirations of
humanity. Even to the present day this division distorts our sense of
beauty and prevents our realizing an ideal of art.
After all, the separation between the Greeks and us is due to something
outside us rather than within--principally to the Hebraistic culture we
receive in childhood. We are taught to think that one form of religion
contains the whole truth, and that one way of feeling is right, to the
exclusion of the humanities and sympathies of races no less beloved of
God and no less kindred to ourselves than were the Jews. At the same
time, the literature of the Greeks has for the last three centuries
formed the basis of our education; their thoughts and sentiments,
enclosed like precious perfumes in sealed vases, spread themselves
abroad and steep the soul in honey-sweet aromas. Some will always be
found, under the conditions of this double culture, to whom Greece is a
lost fatherland, and who, passing through youth with the _mal du pays_
of that irrecoverable land upon them, may be compared to visionaries,
spending the nights in golden dreams and the days in common duties.
Has, then, the modern man no method for making the Hellenic tradition
vital instead of dream-like--invigorating instead of enervating?
There is, indeed, this one way only--to be natural. We must imitate
the Greeks, not by trying to reproduce their bygone modes of life and
feeling, but by approximating to their free and fearless attitude
of mind. While frankly recognizing that much of their liberty would
for us be license, and that the moral progress of the race depends
on holding with a firm grasp what the Greeks had hardly apprehended,
we ought still to emulate their spirit by cheerfully accepting the
world as we find it, acknowledging the value of each human impulse,
and aiming after virtues that depend on self-regulation rather than
on total abstinence and mortification. To do this in the midst of our
conventionalities and prejudices, our interminglement of unproved
expectations and unrefuted terrors, is no doubt hard. Yet if we fail of
this, we miss the best the Greeks can teach us. Nor need we fear lest,
in the attempt, we should lose what Christianity has given us. Those
who believe sincerely in the divine life of the world, who recognize
the truth that there can be nothing vitally irreconcilable between the
revelations made to the great races that have formed our past, will
dismiss such fears with a smile. It was not against the spirit of the
Greeks that St. Paul preached, but against the vices of a decadent
society in Hellas. It is not against the spirit of Christianity that
modern reformers lift their voices, but against the corruption and
exaggeration of its precepts in monasticism and Puritanism. The problem
of the present and the future is to bring both spirits into due accord,
to profit by both revelations while avoiding their distortion and abuse.
In the struggle of the adverse forces, felt so strongly ever since the
reactionary age of the Renaissance, there is, however, now at least a
hope of future reconciliation. The motto
Im Ganzen, Guten, Schönen
Resolut zu leben,
is not a strictly Christian sentence. St. Paul had said: "To me to
live is Christ, and to die is gain." But it is essentially human.
The man who lives by it is restored to that place in the world which
he has a right to occupy, instead of regarding himself as an alien
and an outcast from imagined heaven. Science must be our redeemer.
Science which teaches man to know himself, and explains to him his
real relation to nature. The healthy acceptance of the physical laws
to which we are subordinated need not prevent our full consciousness
of moral law. It is true that the beautiful Greek life, as of leopards
and tiger-lilies and eagles, cannot be restored. Yet neither need we
cling to the convent or the prison life of early Catholicity. The new
freedom of man must consist of submission to the order of the universe
as it exists. The final discovery that there is no antagonism between
our physical and spiritual constitution, but rather a most intimate
connection, must place the men of the future upon a higher level and
a firmer standing-ground than the Greeks. They by experience and
demonstration will know what the Greeks felt instinctively. Their
#aisthêsis#, permeated and strengthened by the ever-during influence of
Christianity, will be further fortified by the recognition of immutable
law. The tact of healthy youth will be succeeded by the calm reason of
maturity.
FOOTNOTES:
[274] This chapter was written with the purpose of simply illustrating
the _æsthetic_ spirit of the Greeks. I had no intention of writing
a complete essay on the spirit of the Greeks as displayed in
their history and philosophy. Nor did I, in what I said about the
illustrative uses of Greek sculpture, seek to sketch the outlines of a
systematic study of that art. Therefore I chose examples freely from
all periods without regard to chronology or antiquarian distinctions.
[275] But, while we tell of these good things, we must not conceal the
truth that they were planted, like exquisite exotic flowers, upon the
black, rank soil of slavery. That is the dark background of Greek life.
Greek slaves may not have been worse off than other slaves--may indeed
most probably have been better treated than the serfs of feudal Germany
and Spanish Mexico. Yet who can forget the stories of Spartan helotry,
or the torments of Syracusan stone-quarries, or the pale figure of
Phædon rescued, true-born Elean as he was, by Socrates from an Athenian
house of shame?
[276] See the introduction to my chapter on Athens in _Sketches in
Italy and Greece_ for the characteristic quality given to Attic
landscapes by gray limestone mountain ranges.
[277] This statue, usually called the Apoxyomenos, may possibly be a
copy in marble of the Athlete of Lysippus which Tiberius wished to
remove from the Baths of Agrippa. The Romans were so angry at the
thought of being deprived of their favorite that Tiberius had to leave
it where it stood.
[278] Engraved in Müller's _Denkmäler der alten Kunst_, plate xli.
[279] Neapolitan Museum.
[280] British Museum.
[281]
Ah, vain and thoughtless men, who wail the dead,
But not one tear for youth's frail blossom shed!
[282] Of this statue there are many slightly different copies. The best
is in the Vatican.
[283] See the Mercury of the Belvedere.
[284] Engraved in Clarac, _Musée de Sculpture_, Planches, vol. iv. pl.
666 c.
[285] Bronze, at Naples.
[286] Drum of column from Ephesus, British Museum.
[287] Louvre.
[288] The Capitol.
[289] Glyptothek, Munich.
[290] The Vatican.
[291] Naples.
[292] See vol. i. p. 268, note, for an English version of this line.
[293] "To live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the
Beautiful." These two lines are sometimes misquoted--_Schönen_ being
exchanged for _Wahren_, Beauty for Truth.
[294] The Greek Pantheon, regarded from one point of view, represents
an exhaustive psychological analysis. Nothing in human nature is
omitted; but each function and each quality of man is deified. To Zeus
as the supreme reason all is subordinated.
[295] See vol. i. p. 302 for a translation of this scolion attributed
to Simonides, and vol. i. p. 337 for a translation of a Hymn to Health,
which develops the same theme.
[296] I have already touched on this point in the chapters on the
Attic drama. It is, indeed, very interesting to trace the growth of
the morality of Nemesis and the divine #phthonos# in the earlier Greek
authors--its purification by Æschylus, and still further subsequent
refinement by Sophocles; finally its rejection by Plato, who says
emphatically: "Envy has no place in the heavenly choir." A childish
fear of the divine government pervaded the Greeks of the age of
Herodotus. This by the dramatists was exalted to a conception of the
holy and the jealous God. But the good sense of the Greeks led the
philosophers to eliminate from their theory of the world even the
sublime theosophy of Æschylus. The soul of man, as analyzed by Plato in
the _Republic_, has only to suffer from the inevitable consequences of
its own passions. Plato theorizes the humanity implicit in Homer.